Nobel in Literature Goes to Kenzaburo Oe of Japan

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TOKYO, Oct. 13

The Swedish Academy announced today in Stockholm that Kenzaburo Oe, a Japanese writer known for his powerful accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and his struggle to come to terms with a mentally handicapped son, had won the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Mr. Oe, 59, is just the second Japanese writer to capture the award. Yasunari Kawabata won it in 1968. But while Mr. Kawabata generally explored traditional Japanese themes with a delicate writing style, Mr. Oe has written politically charged tales filled with anger and a sense of betrayal, like the postwar generation he has come to represent.

Mr. Oe (pronounced OH-ay) came of age during the American occupation, after Japan's shattering defeat in World War II. He was recognized as a leading writer in the late 1950's when he was still a university student. While some authors found nothing but despair in those bleak years, Mr. Oe's short stories, left-wing political essays and lyrically written novels revolve around what critics describe as a core of hope and courage mixed with bitter humor.

In perhaps his most famous novel, "A Personal Matter," first published in 1964, the protagonist plots the murder of his infant son, who has been born with severe brain damage, but finally realizes he must take responsibility for the child and embraces him. The influences on Mr. Oe's complex art range from Jean-Paul Sartre to the Mark Twain of "Huckleberry Finn." The Swedish Academy noted the "poetic force" of Mr. Oe's beautifully rendered works, saying he "creates an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today."

The academy also cited the impact of Japan's defeat on Mr. Oe's development as a writer. "The humiliation took a firm grip on him and has colored much of his work," the academy said. "He himself describes his writing as a way of exorcising demons."

In a telephone interview from his Tokyo home tonight, Mr. Oe, a voluble if somewhat solemn man, said the call from Stockholm, at a little before 9 P.M. local time, had come as a thunderbolt. "It was a total surprise," he said. "Completely. Total."

While he has often spoken of his ambiguous feelings about Japan, he said he was proud the Swedish Academy recognized the strength of modern Japanese literature and hoped the prize would encourage others here. "I believe I am a very Japanese writer," he said. "I have always wanted to write about our country, our society and feelings about the contemporary scene. But there is a big difference between us and classic Japanese literature."

He said that ultimately his writing was focused on a single concern. "I am writing about the dignity of human beings," he said.

Mr. Oe is the 91st recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was won last year by Toni Morrison. The prize includes an award of $930,000.

Though he is one of Japan's most acclaimed authors, and had been mentioned in recent years as a potential Nobel winner, Mr. Oe is relatively unknown in the United States and much of his writing has never been translated into English. Several American publishers, including Kodansha America, Grove/Atlantic and M. E. Sharpe, have published his works in translation in the United States, and all said yesterday that they planned to make copies of the work more readily available.

Because the three previous winners -- Derek Walcott, Nadine Gordimer and Ms. Morrison -- write in English, speculation before today's announcement had centered on authors from Europe or Asia. Among those considered in the running were the Belgian poet, playwright and novelist Hugo Claus, who writes in Flemish; the German novelist and playwright Peter Handke; the Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom; the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer; the Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo, and the Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

The owlish, often detached-looking Mr. Oe grew up in a small village on the western island of Shikoku, a place steeped in Japan's rural traditions and wartime propaganda. The sense of wonder and security he seems to have felt in those innocent days, before the atomic bomb was dropped and an emperor he was taught to regard as divine announced that Japan had been defeated, appears again and again in his writing as a sort of Eden.

His early works, written while he was studying French literature at Tokyo University, are regarded as classics of the disillusionment his nation felt on seeing what Japan's leadership had done to the country. One of his first published stories, "An Odd Job," describes a young man whose job is to bring dogs to a laboratory where they will be used in experiments. Looking at the huddled animals, he compares them to Japan's university students.

"That was the beginning of his literary odyssey," said John Nathan, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who translated several of Mr. Oe's early books into English. "He was the first Japanese writer taken thunderously as a serious writer while he was still a student."

Mr. Oe supported leftist causes, particularly opposition to the United States-Japan security treaty, which permits the maintenance of a string of American military bases across Japan. His popularity was near its peak during anti-treaty riots in 1960.

The birth of his first son, in 1963, altered his life and career. Mr. Oe's wife, Yukari, the daughter of a well-known author, Mansaku Itami, gave birth to a boy with serious brain damage. Just two months later, Mr. Oe visited Hiroshima and spoke with survivors of the atomic bombing.

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Out of those experiences he produced "A Personal Matter" and "Hiroshima Notes," an account of the courage of some of the survivors of the bombing in the face of the dehumanizing horror of the event.

He was the youngest of a generation of authors who responded to the war experience by depicting a world knocked off its center and surrounded by dark, irrational forces.

In the telephone interview he compared himself to Kobo Abe, the author of the surrealistic novel "The Woman in the Dunes"; Shohei Ooka, who wrote about the horrors of the fighting in the Philippines during the war, and Masuji Ibuse, best known for "Black Rain," a novel about the victims of the atomic bombing. "They created the way to the Nobel Prize," Mr. Oe said. "I am the youngest one of that group. I received the prize in their place."

Mr. Abe and Mr. Ibuse died last year. Ooka died in 1988.

Mr. Oe also acknowledged that the seriousness of his generation and its political agenda made it seem old-fashioned compared with young Japanese writers today, who have tended to be more introspective and more concerned with materialism than with war. "I am the last author who practices the old, very heavy or sincere way of writing," Mr. Oe said.

While Mr. Oe has a reputation as a dour and at times overly earnest man, Mr. Nathan, who has known him for 30 years, said that the writer could be spontaneous and impish with friends. "He does maintain a very solemn pose," Mr. Nathan said, "but the other side is that the guy can be a wild man."

Mr. Oe is a voracious reader, particularly of English-language and French authors. Mr. Nathan said an evening's conversation could take in everything from the tense used in a John Updike novel to W. H. Auden's poetry.

Recently, the theme of redemption has become more prevalent in Mr. Oe's work. This, too, may be related to his personal life. His eldest son, Hikari (Japanese for light or light beam), has overcome his disability enough to become a composer. (Mr. Oe also has a daughter, Natsumiko, and another son, Sakurao.)

In a documentary shown on Japanese television recently, Mr. Oe was shown completing the final pages of the last novel in a trilogy. He ended the book by declaring that with Hikari's new career under way, he would not write any further novels. He then penned in English a closing word, "Rejoyce."

Lyrical, Searing Images Of Dislocation and Anger

"Is there any possibility that the baby will grow up normally if he's operated on? At the hospital where he was born yesterday they said the most we could hope for even with surgery was a kind of vegetable existence."

"A vegetable -- I don't know if I'd put it that way. . . ." The doctor, without a direct reply to Bird's question, lapsed into silence. Bird watched his face, waiting for him to speak again. And suddenly he felt himself being seized by a disgraceful desire. It had quickened in the darkness of his mind like a clot of black slugs when he had learned at the reception window that his baby was still alive, and gradually had made clear to him its meaning as it propagated with horrid vigor. Bird again dredged the question up to the surface of his conscious mind: how can we spend the rest of our lives, my wife and I, with a monster baby riding on our backs? Somehow I must get away from the monster baby. If I don't, ah, what will become of my trip to Africa? In a fervor of self-defense, as if he were being stalked through the glass partition by the monster baby in an incubator, Bird braced himself for battle. At the same time he blushed and began to sweat, ashamed of the tapeworm of egotism that had attached itself to him. One ear was deafened by the roar of blood hurtling through it and his eyes gradually reddened as though walloped by a massive, invisible fist. The sensation of shame fanned the red fire in his face and tears seeped into his eyes -- ah, Bird longed, if only I could spare myself the burden of a monstrous vegetable baby. But voice his thoughts in an appeal to the doctor he could not do, the burden of his shame was too heavy. Despairing, his face red as a tomato, Bird hung his head.

-- From "A Personal Matter" (Grove Press, 1969)

And so it came about one morning in the winter of 196- that the fat man and his fat son set out for the zoo together. Eeyore's mother, anxious about the effect of the cold on his asthma, had bundled him into clothing until he couldn't have worn another scrap; and the fat man himself, who preferred the two of them to be dressed as nearly alike as possible, had outfitted him on their way to the station in a woolen stocking cap identical to the one he had worn out of the house. The result was that, even to his father, the boy looked like an Eskimo child just arrived from the Pole. This meant without question that in other eyes they must have appeared, not a robust, but simply corpulent, Eskimo father and son. Bundled up like a pair of sausages, they stepped onto the train with their hands clasped tightly and, sweat beading the bridges of their noses and all the skin beneath their clothing, a flush on their moon faces where they were visible between their stocking caps and the high collars of their overcoats, enjoyed its lulling vibrations.

-- From "Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness" (Grove Press, 1977) The Very Few, Soon to be Many

Despite fame and popularity in his native Japan, Kenzaburo Oe has not been widely published in English, though that is certain to change now that he is a Nobel laureate. These are some of the major works available in English now.

FICTION

The Catch, Japan Quarterly (1958)

A Personal Matter, Grove Press (1969)

The Silent Cry, Kodansha International (1974)

Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, Grove Press (1977)

The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath, Grove Press (1984) NONFICTION